Modern living is characterized by people being highly mobile, and as a result, communication between persons, often away from their offices or residences, has spawned need for new modes of communication interchanging. Well known of such recent new modes of communication are for example mobile communications in the form of e.g. cellular mobile radio, person paging systems and voice mail. Each of these relatively recent technologies have made it considerably easier to locate and reach persons frequently away from their normal base of operation.
Even with aid of these new technologies, it is still often difficult or impossible to communicate with a person who is highly mobile.
The present invention is directed to overcoming the problem of reaching a person who is mobile and at the same time wants to be able to receive his or her messages, regardless of where he is at the time of a call. Along the same line this person may also wish to have a record of any caller who has attempted to reach him if he had not been able to answer the call.
In the known art, U.S. Pat. No. 5,193,110 describes an integrated services platform for telephone communication. This patent describes a system including a plurality of application processing parts for providing different types of information services through the telephone system.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,914,690 and 4.930,15 describe a universal PBX-to-central office interface for standards conversion for supporting normally incompatible telephone equipment in a PBX environment, and an interface which attaches between an incoming trunk line from a central office and a PBX which monitors the communication between the central office and the PBX and records signals between the central office and the PBX for later downloading to telephone peripheral equipment attached to the PBX, such as voice mail and the like.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,975,941 describes an intercept system for integrating personalized services of switchboard attendants associated with on-premises PBX switching systems enabling the calling parties to complete their own calls when the telephone extension numbers of the called parties are known to the calling parties.
A considerable body of art is directed to enhancing and/or facilitating the process of reaching a person who is in proximity to a telephone line of a central office or a PABX. The known art, however, suffers from the drawback that human intervention is almost always required in completing such calls, and in addition, considerable investments are required in switching apparatus to perform these services.